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Caroline Wyatt, the veteran BBC correspondent, hid the effects of multiple sclerosis from the corporation for nearly fifteen years, because she did not want bosses to think she was unreliable.

Wyatt, who stepped down from her post as religious affairs correspondent last week after revealing that she suffers from MS, said that she was told that she may have been suffering the condition in 2001, after becoming “very wobbly on my feet”, in Moscow.

But she added: “It wasn’t a diagnosis I liked and, because I wasn’t ill and I was doing a job I loved, I just carried on. You don’t want to be seen as someone who is possibly fallible, someone who might not be able to do the job well. I didn’t want the BBC to think, ‘We can’t send her somewhere or rely on her.’

Wyatt is taking an extended summer break, before moving to a presenting role.Credit:
BBC

“It’s only been the past two years when I’ve had to admit that actually I have got a problem. When I was tired I just hit a wall, and had to go to bed.”

Wyatt, who spent seven years as defence correspondent, and was embedded with British troops during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is taking an extended summer break, before moving to a presenting role.

Describing the effects of the neurological condition, she said she now needs to walk with a stick.

The presenter told Radio Times: “I’m slightly unsteady on my feet at the moment. I fell over in the street the other day, which was a really big shock. Neither my vision nor my balance are particularly good at the moment, so I am a bit cooped up at home.

"Every day you wake up you feel different. Some days you feel relatively normal, other days your brain is so foggy you can’t think. You forget words, you forget names. It’s that absolute sense that your body is betraying you.

"That you are not in control of it, it is in control of you. I am hoping that at some stage I will get back to walking without the stick. But maybe I am in denial.”

Asked if the illness had reduced her to tears, she replied: "When I woke up with double vision about four weeks ago, I sat on the edge of the bed and thought, ‘Good grief, if I don’t save my sight and do something fairly radical about the way that I’m living, then it is actually entirely possible I will lose my sight, and if I lose my sight I won’t be able to do all the other things I want to do in life – whether that’s painting, writing dreadful poetry.

Utterly overwhelmed by the good wishes and prayers, and profoundly grateful for the support from my family, friends and colleagues + the BBC

“It was really quite a bleak moment, where for the first time I sat down and looked it in the face and thought, ‘B-----.’”

Wyatt also said that her condition had led to her considering her own mortality. She told the magazine: “Reporting news is often about reporting death, particularly in the places I have been. But it’s less terrifying to me to think of being blown up and dying than to think, ‘Gosh, I might decline slowly day by day, losing a little bit of capability every day.’

@55rach Hope to be back at work presenting programmes for Radio 4 and World service radio from September or maybe even August.

"And where will I end up? Will I end up in a wheelchair, unable to walk, unable to do all the things I love? And that I think is harder for me to deal with, because of the effect it has on your family.”

The reporter, who was born in Australia before being adopted by a British diplomat, revealed that she had traced her birth parents in 1990, who had since split up and were living separate lives.

After she reintroduced the couple, they were reconciled. She said: “My mother literally moved in with him three or four days after they met again, and they were married within a few years. I was bridesmaid at their wedding and it was just the most wonderful day. They absolutely adored each other, so it was lovely to see them back together again and married.”